TV News Record: New search, important data, & more fact-checks

A round up on what’s happening at the TV News Archive by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman. Additional research by Robin Chin.

This week we present new TV news search features, inventory data of TV news recordings from GDELT, and the State of the Union, fact-checked by national fact-checking partners.

New TV news search features

We’re pleased to announce new search options on the TV News Archive, making it easier to find what you’re looking for, as well as integrating TV news material into global search at the Internet Archive. The work of TV Architect Tracey Jaquith, and designed by Carolyn Li-Madeo, these new features include:

Search TV news captions directly from Archive.org. “Search TV news captions” is now a selectable item on the main search bar at the Internet Archive. You no longer need to start from the TV News Archive home page.

Or, search from TV News Archive home page. You can also search from the TV News Archive website homepage: archive.org/tv. Click on “Advanced Search” to drill down into the details.

Toggle between video thumbnails and text view. Don’t want to see video screenshots when you enter a search term? We now offer the ability to choose a “text view” that provides search results in a list format. Click on the text box icon on the upper right hand side of search results to switch to text view.

Search more than one facet at a time. Now you can select more than one TV program at a time to refine your search, as well as click multiple options for search for other attributes, such as topics and subjects.

More facets viewable. You’ll also see longer lists of available facets when you click on the “More” option.

New sort options. There are new sort options. For example, click on “views” to see TV news clips that have been viewed the most on the Internet Archive.

If you are doing an advanced analysis of captioning or other TV News Archive metadata, it can be helpful to know the exact TV News Archive recordings on a given date and time. Thanks to data scientist Kalev Leetaru, this information is now available on GDELT in a downloadable format.

“Inevitably with an archive this massive spanning back to 2009 there will be brief outages or other disruptions and some stations may be monitored for only a specific period of time (such as adding local stations in key markets during specific months of a national election cycle),” writes Leetaru.

Knowing the exact broadcasts captured can help analysts who want to make sure a trend they are seeing – for example, a big dip or large increase in mentions of a particular term – is a valid trend or a reflection of outages or new stations added over a specific time period.

You can download all CSV files via the following URL (replace YYYYMMDD with the date of interest):

State of the Union 2018, fact-checked

The 2018 State of the Union is in the history books now – and preserved now on the TV News Archive, with links to 26 fact-checked clips (48 total fact-checks) by the TV News Archive’s fact-checking partners: FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker.

For example, all three fact-checking organizations checked President Donald Trump’s statement, “We enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history.”

PolitiFact: “In inflation-adjusted dollars, the recent tax bill is the fourth-largest since 1940. And as a percentage of GDP, it ranks seventh. We rate the statement False.”

FactCheck.org: “CRFB [Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget] said the tax cut in 1981 under President Ronald Reagan, at 2.9 percent of GDP, is the largest in history.”

WaPo: “Trump’s tax cut is only the eighth-largest — and is even smaller than two of Barack Obama’s tax cuts.”

And here’s a fact-check of the Democratic rebuttal of the SOTU by Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D., Mass. Kennedy, when he said: “We choose an economy strong enough to boast record stock prices and brave enough to admit that top CEOs making 300 times the average worker is not right.”

WaPo: “What Kennedy leaves out is that the EPI study is updated annually, and in the most recent version, covering 2016, the ratio between CEO and worker pay at the top 350 companies had declined somewhat, to 271 to 1. In making his point, Kennedy accurately refers only to the ‘top CEOs.’ But it’s important to note that he is presenting an outdated snapshot of only one year (2013) and that the EPI study is not the only research on this subject. Similar data from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg show that the ratio between what top CEOs and their workers make is closer to 200 to 1.”

PolitiFact: “His numbers describing today’s ratio, while credible, are on the high side of research. The AFL-CIO put the ratio at 347-to-1. The liberal Economic Policy Institute said CEOs make either 271 or 224 times that of average employees, depending on how you measure stock options. Bloomberg pegged the ratio at 265-to-1.” PolitiFact rated the claim Mostly True.